1727-1788 British Thomas Gainsborough Locations English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was the contemporary and rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honoured him on 10 December 1788 with a valedictory Discourse (pubd London, 1789), in which he stated: If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art, among the very first of that rising name. He went on to consider Gainsborough portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always to match itself. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their generation. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, he nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. He founded his landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British countryside. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude and Titian. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson (1730-1803), claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was, nevertheless, as his surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly cultured. He loved music and performed well. He was a person of rapidly changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. At the time of his death he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He painted with unmatched skill and bravura; while giving the impression of a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and sophisticated painters of his generation. It has been usual to consider his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged by their contemporaries; while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most powerful expression by William Hogarth. His portraits, landscapes and subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their complexity; having previously been viewed as being isolated from the social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have yet to be fully related to them. It is clear, however, that his landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788.  Related Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough :. | Portrait of Johann Christian Fischer | Mrs Thomas Hibbert. Neue Pinakothek. | Mrs Mary Robinson (mk25 | Portrait of Lady Margaret Georgiana Poyntz | Cornard Wood,Near Sudbury,Suffolk |
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William Knight Keeling
(1807-1886) was a British (Victorian) artist, an illustrator of Walter Scott's novels and Shakespeare's plays, a founder and the third President of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. William Knight Keeling. Love's Messenger. 1856William Knight Keeling was born in Manchester. He was apprenticed to a wood-engraver, and in the 1830s went to London and became an assistant of William Bradley (1801-1857), a Manchester-born portrait painter who moved to London in 1822 and established himself as a portrait painter. However, Keeling returned to Manchester in 1835 and firmly established himself as a popular and respected portrait and figurative painter in oils and watercolour, and a drawing-master. From 1830s, he actively exhibited in Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. In 1833, his painting 'The Bird's Nest' was awarded the silver medal from the Royal Manchester Institution. In 1841, he was elected a member of the New Society of Painters in Watercolours where he exhibited about 60 works. In 1859, Keeling became a founder of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, and its third president from 1865 to 1877. He was a member of the Manchester Literary Club and the Brasenose Club. In the 1850s, following the notion of the day, he travelled to Spain. This journey gave him new ideas, subjects, and motifs. Delicate details and clear and bright palette inspired by hot colours of the South, are distinctive features of his paintings and watercolours. In 1873, a Manchester newspaper praised one of his watercolours as "an exquisite work, perfectly Spanish". He also was influenced by works by the great Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682). Murilloes street children can be easily recognised in Keelinges compassionate depictions of poor children, both British and Spanish. His eSpanish Boye exhibited in Manchester in 1876, was described as "a very good example of the careful and accurate method pursued by the artist. He is thoroughly conscientious in all his professional work." In 1851, in London, Keeling married Mary Ann Charker (b.1822). They had four children: Edith (b.1852), Dalton Harper (b.1853), Sidney Charles (b.1859), and Gertrude Ann (b.1862). Keeling died on 21.02.1886 in his house at Barton-upon-Irwell, Manchester. Keeling did not strive for fame and glory, and remained in the background of the artistic life of his time, although many connoisseurs appreciated his works. Several his works have been preserved at Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In the 1870s, Wolverhampton industrialist and collector Sidney Cartwright purchased from a Manchester exhibition a large number of Keelinges works. In 1887, they were given to Wolverhampton Art Gallery which possesses today possibly the largest collection of Keelinges paitings and watercolours in the United Kingdom.
Leopold Graf Von Kalckreuth
1855-1928,German painter and etcher. The son of the late Romantic landscape painter Eduard Stanislaus, Graf von Kalckreuth (1820-94), he studied from 1875 to 1878 under Ferdinand Schauss (1832-1916), Willem Linnig (1819-85) and Alexander Struys (1852-1941) at the Kunstschule in Weimar founded by his father. In 1879, after military service, he enrolled at the Akademie in Munich, where he attended Gyula Benczer's drawing classes and continued his study of painting under Karl Theodor von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez (1839-1907). In 1883 he travelled to the Netherlands and then to Italy and France. In 1885 he accepted a teaching appointment at the Kunstschule in Weimar, but in 1890 he resigned and returned to Munich. During the next five years he worked at Heckricht in Silesia (now Jedrzychowice, Poland), perfecting his oil technique. In 1892 he was a founder-member of the Munich Secession. Kalckreuth's work from this period reflects the influence of several contemporaries; the portrait of the Artist's Wife of 1888 (Leipzig, Mus. Gesch.) recalls the portraits of Franz von Lenbach and Max Liebermann, while the visionary element brought to the genre scene Rainbow (1894-6; Munich, Neue Pin.) is close to the work of Fritz von Uhde.
Jost Amman
(June 13, 1539, Zerich - March 17, 1591, Nuremberg, Bavaria) was a Swiss artist, celebrated chiefly for his woodcuts, done mainly for book illustrations. Amman was born in Zurich, the son of a professor of Classics and Logic. He was himself well-educated. Little of his personal history is known beyond the fact that he moved to Nuremberg in 1560, where he continued to reside until his death in March 1591. He worked initially with Virgil Solis, then a leading producer of book illustrations. His productiveness was very remarkable, as may be gathered from the statement of one of his pupils, that the drawings he made during a period of four years would have filled a hay wagon. A large number of his original drawings are in the Berlin print room. About 1,500 prints are attributed to him. He was one of the last major producers of woodcuts for books, as during his career engravings were gradually taking over that role. Although like most artists for woodcut he normally let a specialist formschneider cut the block to his drawing, he sometimes included both a cutter's knife and a quill pen in his signature on prints, suggesting he sometimes cut his own blocks. A series of engravings by Amman of the kings of France, with short biographies, appeared in Frankfurt in 1576. He also executed many of the woodcut illustrations for the Bible published at Frankfurt by Sigismund Feierabend. Another serial work, the Panoplia Omnium Liberalium Mechanicarum et Seden-tariarum Artium Genera Continens, containing 115 plates, is of great value. Amman's drawing is correct and spirited, and his delineation of the details of costume is minute and accurate. Paintings in oil and on glass are attributed to him, but none have been identified.